van Dyk Gallery

Francesco Clemente

1952

Francesco Clemente was
born in Naples in 1952, where he spent his childhood and adolescence in
close contact with seventeenth century art.

\After
finishing secondary school, he taught himself painting and began to
write and publish poetry. In 1970 he moved to Rome to attend the faculty
of Architecture and met a number of artists including Cy Twombly and
Alighiero Boetti, who influenced his initial artistic work.
He held his first personal exhibition at the Galleria di Valle Giulia in
Rome, then went to India, where he opened a studio in the city of
Madras.

In 1979 he joined the
Transavantgarde movement, theorised by the critic Achille Bonito Oliva,
and became one of its leading exponents together with Chucchi, Chia, De
Maria and Paladino, with whom he put on an exhibition in Cologne.

From the 1980s onwards he
achieved major international success at a time in history when artists
were reacting against the dominant conceptual movement.

He created a series
inspired by the stations of the cross, produced numerous books, a
collection of photographs of architecture and a group of miniatures
painted in collaboration with the Indian artists of Madras.

In 1981 he moved to New
York, where he now lives and works. He frequently puts on personal
exhibitions in Europe and in the United States. The one held in the
Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna is a foretaste of the major
exhibition that the Guggenheim Museum in New York will be devoting to
him next autumn.